I suggest a campaign about ...

SAVE CORK STREET

Standard Life are putting part of their extensive property portfolio on Cork Street up for sale. This would destroy 7 art galleries including The Mayor Gallery which was the first gallery on Cork Street in 1925. Selling this huge development would destroy almost 90 years of history. Cork Street is renowned throughout the world as an art collectors paradise and clients come from around the world to come and see, and buy art there. Students come from around the UK to study there and its location to the Royal Academy make it a convenient and very central place for them to do so.

Destroying over half the street to make room for Bond Street fashion retailers and hedgefunding businesses would destroy what has become one of London's cultural heritages. Bond Street fashion can stay on Bond Street. Like Savile Row is famous for tailors, Cork Street is famous for Art. It has become a London landmark and we should leave it this way.

Please sign up and help petition against yet more corporate greed that will turn this cultural hub into yet another faceless and bland part of the city and help Cork Street maintain its position on the Art world map. Threatening to raise rents will also drive the galleries out. We ask for a substantial lease on these properties so that we can stay here for years to come.

Cork St has been a free and ever-changing college of art for generations of enthusiasts. I have learnt a prodigious amount from popping into its galleries over five decades. It would be tragic for London, its denizens and its visitors, if a large chunk of it was given over to yet more luxury retail shops, of which there is already a gross superfluity.

The ability to be in close proximity, to 'feel' art as well as see it, becomes a more and more precious experience, as we spend more and more time communicating and experiencing so much in our lives on the internet. To find so many galleries historically concentrated in one street offering such a wealth of treasures is a joy that we would wish our children and grandchildren to also be able to experience. It is the meat in the fashion sandwich that is Savile Row and Bond Street.

The changes envisaged for Cork Street will only contribute to the decline of the secondary art market, much to the joy of the auction houses. But anyone interested in art cannot simply go to those auction houses and ask to have a browse around, which is precisely what galleries do to promote the artists they represent.

Please do not destroy Cork Street. You will be destroying a part of London which will have a detremental effect on the whole of the city. London has plenty of retail and office space but relatively speaking, vey little gallery space. Just let it continue to do what it has done so well for the last 90 years.

Not only Londoners, but London's tourists, would be badly affected by the loss of such a celebrated street of exciting new art, something that brings people to the city and helps business enterprise. It would leave a gap in the centre of London and the replacement of it by offices and residential buildings would be as devastating and superfluous to the capital's needs as the arrival of a row of shops within yards of some of the most celebrated shopping streets. Please donlt let this happen; we would all regret it, and it would be impossible to replace.

If it were not for the pioneering Cork Street dealers creating an environment for looking at and learning about contemporary art, the wealth of current activities and interest in this fascinating field might never have developed and London might not have become the great contemporary art city which it is.

If this proposed development goes forwards, the West End will be the poorer for all the additional profit which might be generated to the landlord.

We are saddened by even the remotest chance that any part of Cork Street may be considered an opportunity for change from its dedication over the decades to art. May art and the decades ahead for the galleries on this historic street be preserved.